Enough time has passed to allow my posting on my visit to Zagreb, Croatia in 2015. This and the next post are journal entries made when I visited in 2015. Croatia is a member of the European Union (EU) but its positions are not consistent across the board which reality, I believe, reflects the ambivalence of its people with regards to the EU’s obvious intentions to control the internal politics and policies of its member nations as well as to the “official” EU stances on issues ranging from forced injections to the war currently raging in eastern Europe.
This first post relates an incident which readers may find amusing as well as instructive.
My colleague’s friend’s mother for a long time had wanted to drive to Venice but her husband was reluctant because their car was old and he feared it would not make the round trip. But he did not prohibit her from going. So, on his next business trip, she went, having assured him that all would be well and expressing her confidence that the car would do just fine.
The trip, which is quite scenic, went very well indeed.
However, approaching Venice, a truck (meaning an SUV), swerved onto her lane and crashed head on with her. Providentially, the speeds were low and she was stunned, but not badly hurt.
Actually, she was more worried than she was stunned or hurt. She sat behind the wheel, worrying about what she was going to tell her husband. Clearly the old car was badly, badly damaged. It is their only car. They are not well off. And now, it turns out the car really did not make it to and from Venice after all, as her husband had said. Although, surely, he was not thinking about an accident!
As she sat there, behind the wheel, her mind going a mile a minute, the driver of the truck had gotten out and was walking to her. He came up to her window and began speaking to her, “Madam, please let’s not call the police. I promise that I will take care of this situation for you. Please trust me. As you probably know, the Italian police are horribly bureaucratic. If we go to the police with this, I will be tied up for weeks. And I cannot afford that, I cannot be tied up in police stations and Italian courts. Please allow me the opportunity to make this right,” etc.
While he spoke, his friend had gotten out of the passenger side and had come over and also began speaking to the surprised lady, “Madam, my friend is telling the truth. I vouch for him. And I promise that I too will help him make this right. We will fix your car and leave it as new, I promise you.” Etc.
She really had no choice but to believe these Americans.
So they drove her to her hotel and took her car (or had it towed away).
A day or two later her car was delivered to the hotel. Only it was not her old car; it was a brand new automobile. The Americans called her and explained that her old car was totaled (a typical American term) and could not be repaired. So they happily bought her a new one. They had to assure her that they were not joking.
So she wished the driver, George Clooney, and his passenger, Brad Pitt, a very happy visit and all the very best and a thousand thank you’s and she said good-bye and began her drive back to Croatia.
True story. But her husband still doesn’t believe it!
This happened to the mother of my colleague’s best friend. And they now do have a new car. The timing fits: The Clooney’s were married in Venice, Italy in September, 2014, which was when she drove there. No photos were taken and she was too shocked to think of asking for an autograph. And she is not known for having an imagination that would make up something like this.
I believe my colleague; however, she may have confused Brad Pitt with Mat Damon. Even so, her story has the ring of truth.
George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin celebrate their wedding in Venice, Italy, September, 2014.
In Seeds Planted, I noted the profound, injurious, generational influence Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Frederick Nietzsche have had on Western civilization over the last one hundred and fifty years or so. In other posts, such as Universities: 1960s, I’ve cited the very real, practical impact of such philosophies on professors, students, corporate, and government elites in the 20th and 21st centuries.
To further illustrate this very real, deleterious impact, a brief review of two major events of the Cold War would help.
This post will look at the European event, the next will consider the Asian.
As a kid, I was assured by the Weekly Reader that Marshal Tito was a heroic maverick within Eastern European Communism. That he was a thorn in Stalin’s and, later, Khrushchev’s sides. If you check the ever-so-reliable Wikipedia, you’ll read, “During World War II, he was the leader of the Yugoslav Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in German-occupied Europe.”
With what is now known, and has been known since the mid 1990s when the Venona decrypts (secret messages between Moscow and its American agents) plus Soviet archives were made available, it is inconceivable, but all-too-familiar, that Wikipedia would print such drivel. It is also revealing that the reality behind Tito and his rise to power is still unknown to the vast majority of Americans.
It is most important to keep in mind that the Venona messages were known to United States intelligence back in the 50s. Yes, the “Red Scare” decade, so called. But these were kept undisclosed to Congressional investigators who were in turn castigated — by those hiding the evidence — for “looking for Communists under every bed”.
Not only that, but what the messages revealed was also known to major Communist agents, such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, who, at great risk to their lives, informed the FBI and others in the executive branch (the White House) in both Democrat (Roosevelt, Truman) and Republican (Eisenhower) administrations, each of which stonewalled and did so successfully. The Uniparty is not a new thing.
This knowledge was known and certainly was obtainable by “hard-nosed reporters” like Edward Murrow and Drew Pearson, who instead obfuscated, diverted, and reported calumniously against men and women who attempted to sound the alarm.
George Clooney, who came along decades later, is certainly without excuse. He knew that Annie Moss was indeed a Communist agent. However, his movie focused on Murrow-hagiography and McCarthy-condemnation. In a press interview, Clooney admitted that he knew she had been a Communist but that the issue Murrow supposedly harped on was her right to face her accuser. This is poppycock. She had been afforded that right, something the movie clearly obfuscated. But, of course, if the movie had made it clear that she was a Communist, there would have been no movie.
Most of us will recall that Hitler and Stalin, supposed “enemies to the death”, had agreed to a pact in 1939. This had all the usual suspects clamoring for “peace” and non-intervention except for Japan. There, we were to pull all the stops to help our gallant ally, Chiang Kai-shek. We will look at that part of the sphere, and the dizzying volte-face from Chiang to Mao, in the next post.
While the Pact was still in force, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in early 1941. Resistance to Hitler was a group named the Chetniks, headed by General Draja Mihailovich.
Mihailovich and the Chetniks fought valiantly and successfully until the Hitler-Stalin Pact was abrogated in the late summer of 1941. Then, mirabile-dictu, another “resistance” group arose, called the Partisans. Unlike the Chetniks, who were both anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, the Partisans were Communist. Their leader was Josep Broz, a Stalin protégé whom we know as Tito.
By the end of 1941, after Pearl Harbor, the United States had entered the war as a Soviet ally and in 1942 the pro-Tito blitz in the power corridors of Washington had begun. From whence this push for Tito?
Venona fingers two agents, Duncan C. Lee in Washington and Cedric Belfrage in New York City. Lee was the top assistant of the head of American intelligence, “Wild Bill” Donovan, and Belfrage was the top assistant of Donovan’s counterpart, William Stephenson, who ran British intelligence in North America.
The two men actively recruited Communists and trained them in guerrilla warfare and techniques.
As a side note, Donovan was one of the more colorful figures in modern American history. However, his cold pragmatism whereby he had no concern with Communist agents just so long as they “fought Hitler”, misled him and, more importantly, harmed his country beyond calculation.
The trained guerrilla units were assembled in Cairo where yet another Soviet British agent, James Klugmann, recruiter of the Cambridge Five — Blunt, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Cairncross — operated most successfully.
Klugmann was Tito’s biggest promoter, submitting countless reports praising Tito and denigrating Mihailovich. He attributed military action by Mihailovich to Tito, he showed briefing maps that falsely reflected vast Partisan control over much of Yugoslavia, and he suppressed news of Nazi statements where Mihailovich (not Tito) was named as the enemy of the Reich.
He even lied about Mihailovich’s actions against the Italians by calling them “meetings” and “evidence of collaboration” between the Chetniks and Mussolini.
Incredible — because it was incredible indeed — were his reports describing the Partisans as paragons of virtue and as progressives and lovers of democracy and respecters of rights, ad nauseum.
A less well-known American, Linn Farish of the OSS, the predecessor agency to the CIA, also added his poisonous two cents. He flew into Yugoslavia to work with the Partisans and the British and after a mere 6 weeks there, he submitted a report that mirrored those by Klugmann, praising Tito and condemning Mihailovich and the Chetniks as traitors and Nazi collaborators; a complete inversion of the reality.
Farish had not spent a single minute with Mihailovich; clearly his “report” was hearsay from Klugmann and the Communist Partisans. He even went so far as to say the Partisans reflect the founding of the United States, whose patriots are forerunners of men such as Tito.
His “report”, by some bureaucratic miracle, was placed in the hands of FDR shortly before the Tehran conference with Churchill and Stalin. It became the first item on the agenda and Roosevelt handed it to Stalin, who must have striven mightily to suppress a chortle.
Within weeks, Mihailovich, the anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, was abandoned by England and the United States, and all resources — American, British, and Soviet — were channelled to the Communist Tito who hunted Mihailovich down and had him executed after a show trial.
Venona confirms:
Farish was a KGB contact with the code name “Attila”
Duncan C. Lee supplied the Soviets with top classified information, including the D-Day invasion and operations in China and Japan. He also divulged British and American diplomatic negotiating strategy, something Stalin no doubt very much appreciated
Cedric Belfrage reported to Soviet intelligence on private discussions between Winston Churchill and William Stephenson, head of North American British intelligence. He turned over British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere during World War II and shortly thereafter.
James Klugmann was a devout Communist whose fanaticism did not raise Churchill’s, or any American’s, eyebrows, and whose “reports” were taken at face value.
The above, and many more confirmed by Venona and the Soviet Archives, in addition to United States government files, were responsible for the loss of American, British, and allies’ lives whose activities were divulged to the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, the North Korean Communists, and others.
For the most part, these men and their coteries came from privileged backgrounds and enjoyed the very best education offered by the West, including American Ivy League colleges, Cambridge, and others. We will be looking at that “Western education” in future posts.
None were ever brought to justice.
The next post will look at the same playbook followed on the other side of the globe.
Draja Mihailovich (1893-1946)
Josip Broz “Tito” (1892-1980) and Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
